Eclipse Attacks on Monero’s Peer-to-Peer Network
Ruisheng Shi
Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2025 · Day 1 · Blockchain Security 1
This article delves into a critical security vulnerability affecting Monero, a prominent privacy-focused cryptocurrency. The talk, titled "Eclipse Attacks on Monero’s Peer-to-Peer Network," presented by Julian Pong, a graduate student from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, on behalf of Ruisheng Shi and collaborators, unveils a novel method for launching **Eclipse attacks** against Monero nodes. While Monero is lauded for its robust privacy features at the transaction level, its underlying peer-to-peer (P2P) network layer has remained a potential, yet underexplored, attack surface for these types of isolation attacks.
AI review
Solid, original P2P security research with a clear novel contribution: the Connection Reset Attack exploits Monero's own anti-DoS mechanism to force connection teardowns — a genuinely clever inversion of a defensive feature. Real mainnet experiments, concrete timing numbers, and two distinct exploitation paths give this substance that most blockchain security talks lack.